Quotes by: Salman Rushdie

I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.

Salman Rushdie

I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

Salman Rushdie

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Salman Rushdie

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

Salman Rushdie

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

Salman Rushdie

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Salman Rushdie

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

Salman Rushdie

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Salman Rushdie

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

Salman Rushdie

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.

Salman Rushdie

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

Salman Rushdie

Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.

Salman Rushdie

Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.

Salman Rushdie

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

Salman Rushdie

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Salman Rushdie

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

Salman Rushdie

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Salman Rushdie

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

Salman Rushdie

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.

Salman Rushdie

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.